Hemianopia Add-on for Firefox!

Believe it or not, there's a hemianopia add-on for Mozilla's excellent Firefox web browser. Hemianopia can sometimes cause problems finding the beginning of a line of text, so this add-on draws a vertical line on your Firefox web browser. By clicking and dragging, you can position it wherever is most helpful for your web page.  By double-clicking you can change it's colour or switch it off.  I'd be very interested to know how whether it's helpful.

The link is here: Firefox Hemianopia Add-on.
To get the Firefox browser, click This Link.

The add-on is produced by the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab.

UK Stroke Forum - Vision and Stroke Workshop

The provisional programme for the UK Stroke Forum has now been released.
A "Vision and Stroke Workshop", organised by the British and Irish Orthoptic Society is being held at 9-10:30 in the Alsh Room on 1st December. Talks to include:

09.00-09.20 Visual perception defects following stroke Deborah Parkinson (Teaching Lead and Stroke Specialist Orthoptist, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust)

09.20-09.50 Visual Problems and Driving Professor Chris Dickinson (Professor of Clinical Optometry, University of Manchester)

09.50-10.20 Recovery from Post-Stroke Visual Impairment: Evidence from a Clinical Trials Resource Dr Myzoon Ali (CSO Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Glasgow Caledonian University)

10.20-10.30 Panel Questions

For the full programme, Follow This Link.

Review of Transcranial Direct Durrent Stimulation in Chronic Stroke

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a simple way of directly electrically stimluating the surface of the brain, which seems to be able to increase or reduce how "excitable" (how easily activated by nerve cell inputs) the brain's cortex is.  The hope is that if done in the right way this might help recovery from or rehabilitation of stroke.  It makes a good alternative to transcranial magnetic stimulation, because it's cheaper and more comfortable, so it's being increasingly used.  We don't know for certain how it works yet, but GABA (the main chemical in the brain that is released by nerve cells and inhibits other nerve cells) and glutamate (the main chemical that is released by nerve cells and stimulates other nerve cells) seem to be involved.


This review by Charlotte Stagg in Oxford explains a bit about the use of tDCS in chronic stroke (that is, stroke that happened some time ago).  I'm afraid it's a bit "tech-y", but it's easier than reading the research articles!